Life drawing

Unleash your creativity

Why life drawing?

Life drawing sessions are quiet and tranquil. You are there for 2-3 hours with nothing to think about other than drawing what’s in front of you. This is a stress-free task that is easy to understand but hard to do. It requires focus, so you won’t be thinking about that annoying person at the office, the twelfth item on your to-do list, or how to pay next month’s gas bill. It’s a different type of thought to those that bounce around our minds in modern life ... and it feels very healthy to give your mind this break.

These life drawing sessions are limited so please enrol early to avoid disappointment.

Materials

Pencils!

There are materials you can use other than pencils, but they’re a great place to start. All you really need to know is that a beginner should use a 2B or B pencil for drawing, which is fairly soft. It is easier to make large sweeping movements with these pencils. F or H on it, it’s too hard.

Charcoals

Willow charcoal of Daler-Rowney and Coates are both great. However, they need fixative after drawing, otherwise marks will fade away easily.

Kneading Rubber / eraser

The recommendation here is a kneading or putty rubber. With this, you can be very accurate since you can mold it to the shape and size you require. Also, you can achieve more nuanced rubbing out, so the putty rubber itself becomes like a drawing tool.

Paper/sketchpad

You should use "slight tooth" paper of at the very minimum A3 size and preferably larger. It’s difficult for even experienced artists to draw well on a small page.
Loose sheets of sugar paper were recommended for quick charcoal drawings. They are cheap, have a nice off-white colour and are of sufficient quality. If you want to go for higher quality, 90-120 grs paper is a good bet for both pencils and charcoal (when using pencil).

Folder

To store and protect your precious pictures, it’s a good idea to have a hard folder.

What to expect when the class starts and tutor?

There will usually be a naked female or male person – aged anywhere between 20 and 65 years old. They’ll be posing in the middle of the room with artists standing or sitting in a wide circle around them with easels or sketchpads on their laps.

Usually, the class starts with a warm-up pose for around 2-5 minutes, followed by 10 and 15 minute poses. Then you’ll practice with quick poses. The model will hold a pose for 2-5 minutes and you’ll do rapid sketches of them. Then the poses get longer and you do one long one (maybe 40-60 minutes at the end). The model can hold more difficult poses when it’s just 2-5 minutes, but for the long poses will have to do something easier. That’s why they’re often sitting or lying down for the long poses.

Enrique generally walks around and whispers some one-to-one advice to you for a few minutes, (life drawing is quiet!), and then moves on to the next student. His advice can be really useful, but the contact is short and really you learn from practice.

What if I’m rubbish at drawing?

I was definitely concerned that my drawings would be rubbish before my first class. But of course, you’re not supposed to be great at something during the first class. That’s why the class is useful – because you improve! Life drawing classes don’t really involve too much judgment from your peers anyway. You don’t have to show your drawings to anyone except maybe the teacher if you don’t want to.

Isn’t it weird looking at a naked person for ages?

Not at all, because of the context. A naked person on the bus would be strange. A naked person at a life drawing class is expected and accepted. It’s clear why they are naked – drawing practice – and that isn’t anything to be embarrassed about.

You are there to draw the human body – it’s one of the best things to do to practise your drawing because we are so familiar with the human body and it’s one of the most difficult and most interesting things we can draw.